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Monday, 4 March 2013

Educating the world's rich kids

Britain has benefited from a virtuous circle that brings
wealthy overseas students to the UK, many of whom then go on
to work here (supplementing our skills
base), build companies here or actively trade with us. This Anglophile constituency of the great and
the good are an invaluable asset to the UK.

The cycle works like this:
Wealthy foreigners looking for the best education money can buy select one of the top ranked independent boarding school in the UK. The child gets assimilated into our culture and insists on going
to university in the UK, gaining a good place because of the advantages of private schooling. Once they have been educated here
it’s an easy decision to work here or actively trade with us. This process of indoctrination also helps us
to ‘punch above our weight’ in international relations, imagine if the French
had the private schools we have; they might even be taken seriously in the
corridors of global power.

In addition to these medium term benefits we earn some £500 million p.a. of exports from the fees changed to these overseas students. Added to this success the 500,000 children in private schools save the government about £5 bn a year in education cost. So when people moan about our two tier system they should thank their luck stars that our private sector provides the best education from 8-18 in the world!

Eton Wall game

You would think that the current government would ‘get’
this and be careful to nurture this wonderful advantage we have over our
competitors, particularly as virtually all the cabinet were privately
educated. But it seems this is not the
case.
Home Office data shows that visa applications for overseas student
declined last year by 18 per cent - 62 per cent for the further education
sector, 69 per cent for English language schools. Most worryingly there was a 14 per cent decline for
independent schools. By contrast, the Home
Office data suggested that visa applications for universities had gone up by 3
per cent. Whilst the University number
is good news one should worry about decline in younger students joining our
private schools.

The US, Canada and Australia, are Britain’s main
competitors in the higher education market and they all class students as
temporary migrants, which means they are not included in the overall figures,
and we should do the same. The prime minister has
tried to correct the growing impression that the UK does not welcome overseas
students, emphasising on his recent visit to India that there was no limit on
the number of international students allowed into Britain.

It probably too early to say but it looks like the Tories
have come up with another policy that, although well intention, could be
disastrous due to unintended consequences.